i am writing a paper about "my feminist, activist self".
it is, essentially, a self-location paper: where am i in this movement, and how did i get here?
how do i explain our house? the worn, oversized work-shirts my mother wore on the weekends as she painted walls, pulled weeds, moved earth with her hands and created safe worlds? the clicking of my father's fingers at the keys of his dissertation while i played in brown velvet couch cushions on the floor beside his desk? a wedding at city hall when i was three (i cried the whole time because i wanted to get married, too), followed by dancing and cake in our neighbour's tiny townhouse -- the mirror image of our own -- my parents laughing while i spun in the arms of aunty zoe. she wasn't my aunt but a grad. student like my father, brilliant and loud with the greatest laugh, freckles, and big curly hair.
how do i explain the bookshelves? slim volumes of poetry my father found more precious than gold, heavy hard-covers with bold type curling up the spine: women who run with the wolves, the feminine face of god, alice munro. in my grandmother's house, rita mae brown -- it was just talking cats and a beautiful but masculine woman with a man's name when i was a child.
how is a person made? in family-painted watercolours around a wooden schoolhouse table, may-pole ribbon dances, dark winter afternoons spent sticking my silly-putty to the shelves in a musty, second-hand bookstore while my father haunted the stacks? in my mother's hands, skin split from chores and gardening, nails polished pearlescent pink? whose voice speaks in my own?
